Masterpiece'The Washerwoman' and 'The Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern' (both c. 1733-39) by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Little Women

By

Karen Wilkin

Sept. 14, 2012 5:11 p.m. ET

Toledo, Ohio, may not sound as alluring as its Spanish namesake, immortalized by El Greco, but the Toledo Museum of Art is a gem nonetheless. There's an elegant pavilion designed by the Japanese architectural firm Sanaa Ltd., in 2006, for a collection of more than 5,000 glass objects from antiquity to the present, but since the glass industry has traditionally been a major source of Toledo's wealth, these notable holdings and the distinguished architecture in which they are displayed are not wholly unexpected. The real surprise and the real strength of the museum is its comprehensive gathering of paintings, sculpture and works on paper, from ancient Egypt to postmodernism, including important works by El Greco, Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, the American visionary Thomas Cole, and many others, housed in a staid 1912 neoclassical marble building.

'The Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern' by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Toledo Museum of Art

Yet many Midwestern U.S. cities roughly the same size as Toledo, with similar cultural and economic histories, also have noteworthy art museums—St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati, for example. The excellence and ambition of Toledo's collections are not wholly unprecedented. What's special is that the museum's impressive Old Master and 19th-century paintings are not simply astute selections made during a prosperous past. A large family portrait by Frans Hals, from the early 1620s, was acquired in 2011; a splendid Guercino, "Lot and His Daughters" (1651-52), entered the collection in 2009: and a pair of delectable little genre scenes by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) came to Toledo in 2006.

That the Chardins are outstanding in a collection full of high points is testimony to their merit. Small but potent, "The Washerwoman" and "The Woman Drawing Water at the Cistern" (both c. 1733-39), each less than 16 inches by 12½ inches, make their presence felt across a fairly large gallery. We take in their bold abstract structure, articulated by contrasts of light and dark, even before we come close enough to be engaged by the economically described, telling details. As we approach, we become increasingly aware of the nuances of the warm, earthy palette common to both pictures, of the way light models form, and of the call and response between the two women who inhabit the pair—amply skirted, facing in opposite directions, bending forward to different degrees, and turned at different angles to the viewer.

Come even closer and we are struck by the vigorous paint handling, the straightforward touch that caused the critic, polymath and encyclopedia editor Denis Diderot, Chardin's admirer and friend, to write in 1765: "One can't make things out from close up, while as one moves away the object coalesces and finally resembles nature; and sometimes it affords as much pleasure from close up as from a distance." Next stop, abstraction. Perhaps it was this quality that made Diderot call Chardin "a magician." "Magician" and "magical" recur often in writings about Chardin; no one ever saw him work, and no one ever seems to have figured out how he transubstantiated boldly applied pigment into evocative imagery without getting lost in finicky detail.

We soon realize that "The Washerwoman" and "The Woman Drawing Water at a Cistern" are essentially anthologies of many of Chardin's most compelling genre motifs, with compositions, situations, objects and casts of characters that we have encountered before. Copper cistern? Check. Rough tile floor? Check. View into a light-filled adjoining room? Woman sweeping and standing child, in the distance? Plump calico cat? Sturdy wooden chair? Cascading white linen? Check. And so on. Small as they are, the two paintings tell us everything we need to know about Chardin's "humble" images, the still lifes of kitchen accoutrements or genre scenes, like Toledo's, of life below stairs. These deceptively modest works were so different from his contemporaries' paintings of high-minded historical, biblical and mythological subjects or their accounts of the pleasures of the ancien régime that a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Paris, seeing the young Chardin's work for the first time, thought he was a promising Dutch artist.

In Chardin's lifetime, "The Washerwoman" and "The Woman Drawing Water at a Cistern"—among other of his works—were so admired and in demand that he made multiple versions of them, a common practice at the time. Several variants of both paintings are known, most of them now in major European museums. What's exciting about Toledo's pictures is not only their impeccable provenance and condition, but also that they are recent discoveries. According to Toledo curator Lawrence Nichols, the paintings were found—not long before they were acquired—in a private collection in Lyon, France, where they had been since before the French Revolution.

That sort of thing understandably dazzles art historians and curators, as does the fact that the pair have never been relined, as evidenced by the fresh surface. (Old-fashioned methods of relining, a process of adding a new layer of canvas to the backs of fragile paintings for support, can flatten brushstrokes.) But it's Chardin's magic, the pure visual allure of the two little paintings, that draws us to them: a range of textures—copper, cloth, wood, stone, fur—conjured up by paint that remains paint, weighty forms, palpable light and, above all, the plain-spoken quality of it all. As Diderot wrote when he reviewed the Salon of 1767, Chardin's paintings, for all their modesty, compel our attention because they possess "a coloristic vigor, an overall harmony, a liveliness and truth, beautiful massing, a handling so magical as to induce despair, and an energy in their disposition and arrangement that's incredible."

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